The project has finished

With the performance in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 21rst of July 2018 our Power of Diversity – Crossing Lines Project has finished!
If you want to have a look back, you can watch several video clips at this page or you might rummage in our photo albums by Jennifer Rohrbacher.For deeper interests you have also the possibility to read the book of the project. For all of us it was a beautiful time full of great experiences!

The Music:

Presentation of the book

At September 27th 7p.m. the book of the project, publishes by Theater der Zeit Verlag, Berlin will be presented in the production centre of Action Theatre PAN.OPTIKUM. There in the Lokhalle in Freiburg CROSSING LINES was produced from 17th June until 28th July 2017. Some of the actors will be there and talk about the project and their experiences as well as the artistic director, the choreographers and the producer. This event is a cooperation with the Freiburg bookshop ROMBACH. Tickets available for 5.-€. Reservations only HERE.

New Partner: Rastatt

the performance CROSSING LINES will be presented at the tête-à-tête Festival at June 2nd, 2018.During the next months young people from Rastatt and the region are invited to partizipate und to join our team in a workshop.
Interested? Please contact: info@zweifellos.net

Next Crossing Lines Performance

At the Birds Festival in Murmansk, Russia!
The partner Pikene pa Brøen celebrates its artistical cooperation with the birds festival – which is going on since many years – with the Crossing Lines performance on April 27th 2018.
We are very excited to bring the Power of Diversity project over the border to this wonderful Russian festival!

Pictures of the first three stations of the new CROSSING LINES production

Introduction of Simon Chatterton for the Newbury performance

Welcome to this performance of CROSSING LINES.
The performance here in Newbury is one of the first highlights of a major European project called Power of Diversity. A collaborative project with nine other partner festivals from all over Europe. It is part of the “Creative Europe” programme and is fifty percent funded by the EU Commission. It is also generously supported by Arts Council England and Greenham Common Trust.
Over the past 18 months, German theatre company Pan Optikum have created small productions with many young people in our partners’ cities across Europe.
Some of the performers from these small performances were then invited to come to Freiburg where six weeks of rehearsals created this performance Crossing Lines, which is now touring to our partner festivals. In this way, the project has created an international community that transcends borders and has also been a great pleasure to work on.
As we produced our projects last year we asked the young people taking part about their hopes, their fears and their visions of the future – both for themselves and for the world in which they are living.
Two themes emerged, questions of individual identity and self-awareness but also the bigger questions of the challenges our fractured societies and our planet face.
In this performance that they have created, young people find themselves in the aftermath of a global catastrophe. Cast adrift and isolated they have to rediscover their individual identities.
Finding other survivors they form new tribes, micro-societies based on their own arbitrary rules. But it is not until they open their eyes to others and embrace the wider diversity of the new world around them that they find their path to a new future.
Finally, a piece of practical piece of information:
Small stages will be moving all around the space during the performance, so we ask all of you to get ready to move. Through choosing where you stand you’ll be able to experience entirely new perspectives.
With this information let us wish you an enjoyable evening and present tonight’s performance of Crossing Lines.

Juliet Coveney (project manager)
and
Simon Chatterton (producer)

PREMIERE IN FREIBURG

After six weeks very intense rehearsals the first two evenings will be in Freiburg at July 28th and 29th at the Stühlinger Kirchplatz.
It starts at 10 pm and the duration will be approximately one hour.
Free entrance!
All the organizers of the partner festivals will be there to join us at this very special evening.

Power of Diversity
– The Crossing Lines Project

was the title of the European large scale cooperation project, co-funded by the Creative Culture Programme of the European Union for performances in the public space.
One of its results was a new international ensemble, made up of participants from the site-specific productions initiated by the partners from 2015 to 2017.
In this first phase of the project (2015 and 2016), productions for the public space what been be created for festivals of the ten partners in seven European countries. These performances has been be developed in the corresponding cities with a focus on that city’s history, location and the ideas of the young adults that have participated in the project.
In total 196 young adults from the partner cities worked with the artistic direction team and developed ten productions in two weeks’ times.
They presented these productions within the scope of a festival or special framework program. In addition to the forms typical for this genre (such as acrobatics and theatre), the medium of expression for the productions was primarily hip-hop, and rap (poetry slam).
The venues of the performances were very different eg. like a train station, a cemetery, a former Air base of the Royal Air Force, an old castle, the centre of an old town, a park and others.
After these first period up to three participants from each of the ten partner cities were chosen and invited to come to Freiburg in June/July 2017 for an six weeks intensive production phase. There they developed a large-scale production and presented it for several thousand spectators at the premiere on 28 July 2017.
By the way they felt now like a big family and traveled with this new play with the title “Crossing Lines“ to all the partners again. Unforgettable for sure the performance in the harbor of Murmanks, Russia in April 2018.
The youngsters participating in the initial productions were integrated again in the performances of the newly formed ensemble.
The final of this project was during the Temudas festival in las Palmas de Gran Canaria end of July 2018.

In addition to the artistic focus, whose overall concepted centres on many aspects of crossing lines, the project further aimed to reach and integrate new audiences from different backgrounds.
These audiences were also been interviewed on the several subject matters of the ten different site specific performances of the first period.
Their answers have been digitalised, visualised as aesthetic constructs.These exhibits remain in the partner cities as reminders of a very intense collaboration that changed many lives.